M@P) presents our Fourth Annual Graduate Student Conference "Textual Intercourse: Medieval Appropriations and Appropriation of the Medieval"

Medievalists @ Penn (M@P) presents its

Fourth Annual Graduate Student Conference

Textual Intercourse: Medieval Appropriations and Appropriation of the Medieval

March 17th-18th, 2012

University of Pennsylvania

Keynote speaker: Prof. Kevin Brownlee

Medieval appropriation of ideas served as a method of transcultural and transhistorical interaction, which led to a burgeoning production of new texts. Whether through an explicit translatio studii maneuver or through unapologetic borrowing, medieval cultural producers positioned themselves in relation to other writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians, etc. This year’s theme of intercourse asks us to probe and complicate the questions of influence, communication, translation, and adaptation across time, space, media, and culture, and it will serve as an entry point into this complex matrix of texts and ideas, broadly defined.

Our conference invites submissions concerning one or more formulations of the idea of intercourse and appropriation. We also welcome paper proposals on the concept of medievalism as a post-medieval appropriation of the cultural products of the Middle Ages. As per our group's mission, we welcome a plurality of perspectives from across all fields of study in recognition of the profound interdisciplinarity of our common object of inquiry: the Middle Ages.

Please send 300-word abstracts to pennmedieval@gmail.com by January 15, 2012

Med-Ren at Penn

US News and World Report has ranked Penn #1 in Medieval & Renaissance Literature for 2012.

Workshop with Ann Marie Rasmussen

Ann Marie Rasmussen (Duke University), this year's conference keynote speaker, will be offering a workshop for graduate students on Tuesday, April 5, at 5:00 in Houston Hall Class of '47 Room (third floor). Her topic will be "Philology and Feminism: Translating Medieval German Texts about Prostitution," and we will be reading selections from Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany, with Introductory Essays, eds. and trans. by Ann Marie Rasmussen and Sarah Westphal-Wihl. Medieval Institute Publications: Kalamazoo, MI (2010). Please contact M@P for further details.

Conference Facebook page

RSVP to our Facebook event: Mater(ia) Familias: Family Matters

Mater(ia) Familias Conference Program

The program for the Third Annual Medievalists @ Penn Graduate Student Conference to be held on April 1st and 2nd at the University of Pennsylvania is now available. Program is subject to minor changes.

Friday, April 1

12:00-1:00 Welcome and Registration
Max Kade Center
3401 Walnut St., Room 329-A 

1:00-2:45 Panel I: Sisters in Spirit
Chair: Sierra Lomuto, University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Respondent: Professor Donald Duclow, Emeritus, Gwynedd-Mercy College and Adjunct Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Family Life and the Garment of Love: St Francis and Nicholas Bozon's Lives of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Agnes

Courtney E. Rydel, University of Pennsylvania

Meister Eckhart’s Daughter?

Claire Taylor Jones, University of Pennsylvania

Female Friendship in the Legend of St Katherine

Alexandra Verini, Fordham University

2:45-3:00 Coffee and Tea

3:00-4:45 Panel II: Material Families
Chair: Courtney Rydel, University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Respondent: Professor Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

Unto Philadelphia: The Multiple Genealogies of the Rosenbach Erasmus Novum Testamentum (1519)

Alexander Devine, University of Pennsylvania

Premodern Material Genealogies and the Limits of Arborescence

Thomas Lay, Fordham University 

Families of Glossed Bibles: Classifying Penn MS Codex 1058

Andrew Kraebel, Yale University

5:00 Keynote Address
Van Pelt Library
3420 Walnut St.
Class of 1955 Multimedia Conference Room, 2nd Floor

Professor Ann Marie Rasmussen, Duke University


6:30-8:00 Reception
Van Pelt Library
3420 Walnut St.
4th Floor

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Saturday, April 2

8:45-9:15 Breakfast
Max Kade Center
3401 Walnut St., Room 329-A

9:15-11:00 Panel III: Growing Pains
Chair: Claire Taylor Jones, University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Respondent: Professor Michael Solomon, University of Pennsylvania

“Quyt” the Knight, Queer the Squire: Chaucer's Ontology between Contrary Kin

Elan Justice Pavlinich, Western Michigan University

Fæder, Modor, Bearn: Inscribing Gender through the Family in Beowulf

Brenta Blevins, Radford University

Adolescent Adults: Searching for the Meaning and Cultural Significance of a Troublesome Word in the Furs de Valencia and Fueros de Aragon 

David Gugel, University of Toronto

11:00-11:15 Coffee and Tea

11:15-1:00 Panel IV: Mater Familias
Chair: Sarah Massoni, University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Respondent: Professor David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

Safeguarding Intimacy in The Book of Margery Kempe

Uta Ayala, Fordham University

Matriarchal minne: The Sexes and the Senses in “Die Winsbeckin”

Kathryn Malczyk, University of Pennsylvania

The Marks of Maternal Desire: Reproduction, Imagination, and Longing in Late Medieval English Literature

Samantha Katz, Yale University

1:00-2:00 Break for Lunch

suggestions:

Cosi (36th between Walnut and Chestnut)

restaurants in Houston Hall (Spruce between 34th and 36th)

Au bon pain (Locust Walk between 36th and 37th)

restaurants at the Left Bank (Walnut and 32nd)

2:00-3:45 Panel V: Perverse Paternities
Chair: Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Respondent: Professor Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania

Bastards as Characters: Bastardy as Poetics in Fourteenth-century French Epic

Jonathan Cayer, Yale University

Can the Fairy Son Speak? or, Ambiguous Genealogies and The Anglo-Norman Postcolonial Imaginary in Marie de France's Yonec

Marie Turner, University of Pennsylvania

Saturn’s Coilles and Flos’s Cançons: Castration in the Roman de la Rose and Froissart’s Prison Amoureuse 

Elizaveta Strakhov, University of Pennsylvani

3:45-4:00 Coffee and Tea

4:00-5:30 Roundtable
A free discussion among conference participants, faculty respondents and interested conference attendees bringing together various threads of the conference, underscoring relationships between panels and providing an opportunity for follow-up questions and responses to individual panelists and faculty as well as productive interdisciplinary conversations regarding the conference theme.
Chair: Elizaveta Strakhov, University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Respondent: Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania

This conference is generously supported by the Department of English, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, French Studies, Italian Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and SASGov.

Special thanks to Professor Rita Copeland, JoAnne Dubil, Cliff Mak, Nancy Shawcross and Professor Bethany Wiggin for their invaluable assistance in making this conference possible.

Historicizing Sex: A State of the Field Conference in Early Modern Gender and Sexuality Studies

The website is now up for "Historicizing Sex: A State of the Field Conference in Early Modern Gender and Sexuality Studies" (http://www.english.upenn.edu/Conferences/HistoricizingSex). The conference will be held at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennysylvania, on Friday, March 18, 2011. Registration is free, and we welcome all who are interested in attending the conference. To register, please send your name, institutional affiliation (if available), and email address to historicizingsex@gmail.com by March 7.

The Prince before the Prince: Italian Studies Conference

According to some political theorists, western democracies are paving the road for the coming of a "postmodern prince". This conference analyses the image of the Prince from a historical, literary, political, and juridical perspective, from antiquity to Machiavelli's powerful portrait.  Why has the Prince conquered the imagination of intellectuals as well as common people, across the centuries?

Program

  8:30   Coffee                                    

  9:00   Opening remarks

  9:30   Joseph Farrell, University of Pennsylvania

“On the Good King according to Homer”                    

10:15   Marilynn Desmond, Binghamton University

            “Robert of Anjou, Princeps excellens, rex invictissime”         

11:00   Mario Ascheri, Università di Roma 3

“The Princeps in Late Medieval Legal Texts”

11:45   Lunch break  

 
  2:00   Fabio Finotti, University of Pennsylvania

            “Inventing the Humanistic Prince”

  2:45  Stephen Milner, University of Manchester

“Addressing princes: the rhetoric of Machiavelli’s dedication”

  3:30   Massimo Lucarelli, Université de Savoie

“Il principe tirannico del Trattato sul governo di Firenze di Savonarola”

  4:15   Tea

  4:30   Alessandra Villa, Université de Savoie

“Ariosto’s Princes in the Orlando Furioso”

  5:15   Ann Moyer, University of Pennsylvania

“Before the Prince of Machiavellism: Machiavellian themes in Sixteenth-century Florentine thought”

 6:00   Closing remarks

Spring 2011 Paleography Workshop Schedule

From organizers Alex & Marissa:

We're currently planning another semester schedule full of exciting presentations and challenging scribal hands. We plan to meet on the following Wednesdays from 5-6/6:30 in the Fisher Bennett Hall grad lounge, Room 330: 1/19, 2/2, 2/16, 2/23, 4/6, 4/20. Reserve these dates in your calendar and more details will be on their way shortly.

At our first meeting, next Wednesday 1/19, Megan Cook will present from her ongoing work on Francis Thynne.

M@P Spring Semester Schedule

All meetings will be held in the Fisher-Bennett English Grad Lounge at 6pm.

February 2 - Liza - Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love

February 16 - Courtney - Apocryphal gospel

March 16 - TBA

April 20 - Katie - Hrotsvit von Gandersheim, dramas